ZetaChain holders vote 99.4% to retire L1 and move ZETA to Solana

ZetaChain token holders have voted 99.4% in favour of retiring the project's Layer 1 blockchain and moving ZETA to Solana, according to a governance vote that ended Sunday at 10:58 a.m. ET. The decision still needs a second, separate vote before any migration can begin, and the team has not named a shutdown date.

For a ZETA holder on ZetaChain, the proposal leaves three things unchanged and three things undecided. The token keeps its ticker and its total supply, and each ZETA converts one-for-one into a native Solana SPL token, the format Solana uses for tokens issued on its own chain. Vesting schedules carry over as they are. What the proposal does not yet cover is how staking and rewards will work after the move, or how assets already bridged into ZetaChain from other chains get back to their original networks.

The vote cleared the project's 40% quorum with 58% participation. Opposition and abstentions were each 0.3%.

Why ZetaChain wants to give up its own chain

The migration proposal points to two pressures. As a Cosmos SDK chain, ZetaChain "inherits every upstream advisory and patch, and each one has to be coordinated across dozens of independent validators," the proposal states. It also cites an August 25 patch as evidence that "AI tooling is making such vulnerabilities easier to find," and warns there will be more.

Behind the move is a reorientation toward Anuma, a private AI app the team launched in February. ZetaChain says the app has more than 300,000 users, by its own count, and has handled a million requests across 35 AI models. Holders can already lock ZETA to earn credits to spend on the app. As the proposal puts it, what Solana's AI stack still lacks is the application layer: "an app people use every day, with memory that belongs to them and travels across models, apps, and agents."

What the second vote still has to settle

ZetaChain says it will not put the migration mechanics to a second vote until exchanges confirm their swap arrangements, and has not given a firm date. That second proposal is where the operational details will land: the block height for a balance snapshot, the shutdown block itself, and the procedures for claiming tokens and pulling connected-chain assets off the L1. Until then, ZetaChain keeps running the network and ZETA staking continues.

Where ZETA holders could get stuck

Two open questions stand out. The first is what happens to assets already bridged into ZetaChain from other chains. ZetaChain's original pitch, before its mainnet launch in January 2024, was letting developers use assets from chains as different as Bitcoin and Ethereum in the same application. The mechanics for unwinding those positions on their home chains have not been published.

The second is the carve-out for ZETA on Ethereum and BNB Chain. The current proposal explicitly excludes those tokens from the one-for-one conversion, leaving holders there without a stated migration path. ZetaChain's August 2023 funding round included Blockchain.com and Jane Street Capital, but the team has not disclosed how non-native ZETA will be handled.

For context, last month Cosmos Labs disclosed attacks against six Cosmos EVM chains, though not ZetaChain itself, in which attackers converted stolen funds for about $5.7 million. That incident sits inside the broader Cosmos SDK security pressure the migration proposal is responding to.

ZETA was down about 2.5% in the 24 hours before the vote result was published, per The Block's ZetaChain price page.